Botstein on Schoenberg

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(These are the opening paragraphs of an essay in the newly published
"Schoenberg and His World." Leon Botstein, the author, is President of Bard
College, my alma mater. Bard was labeled by Walter Winchell in the 1950s as
the "little red whorehouse on the Hudson." In his spare time, Botstein
conducts the American Symphony Orchestra.)

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Schoenberg and the Audience: Modernism, Music, and Politics in the
Twentieth Century

LEON BOTSTEIN

"These festival weeks have had nothing to do with music. Schoenberg?s
followers have overdone it. What the consequence of the absolute domination
by dodecaphony will be is that in ten years, I am convinced, no one will
talk about the twelve-tone system."

?G.F. Malipiero, June 1932

It seems that the last twenty years of eclecticism in contemporary music
may have finally undone what "Schoenberg?s followers" have "overdone" for
nearly half a century. It is now respectable and even fashionable to
concede that perhaps audiences have been right all along. Abstract,
inaccessible, unfriendly, harsh, hard to follow, dense, even boring are
still the adjectives applied by most concert-goers to Arnold Schoenberg?s
music. The twentieth-century composer, once most highly respected by
generations of academics, whose music and theoretical writings reveal a
daunting intellect and capacity for analysis, and whose own legendary
contempt for others became routinized Posthumously among those who
specialized in his defense, now appears entirely vulnerable. With a slight
edge of delight, critics are increasingly able to declare?along with
Malipiero, and only superficially in imitation of Boulez, decades
later?that Schoenberg is "dead."

Although thinking and writing about Schoenberg remain valued academic
pursuits, to the public beyond academic circles Schoenberg, except for a
few early works, commands little spontaneous affection, and at best a
grudging respect. If his music is as great as he and his disciples claimed,
why does it remain so difficult, so merely intellectual for so many; why
after three quarters of a century are essays in the genre of Alban Berg?s
1924 classic "Why is Schoenberg?s Music so Difficult to Understand?" still
appropriate?

Five basic factors currently stand in way of a sympathetic reconsideration
of Schoenberg. First and foremost is the success of the so-called
"post-modern." With the collapse of the perceived tyranny of those who
viewed Schoenberg as the true prophet of new music, voices have emerged
(some of them repentant former adherents to the cause) who actually relish
the slaughter of the main sacred cow. From 1945 until the early 1980s, the
accepted wisdom among composers and scholars echoed Ernst Krenek?s closing
comments at the Second International Schoenberg Conference in Vienna in
1984: Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School had altered musical
thinking forever. No composer in the future would be able to circumvent
Schoenberg and his influence, even if he was to write minimalist and tonal
music. Just fifteen years later most successful younger contemporary
composers appear to have paid little or no attention to Schoenberg. This
has altered the paradigm of the history of twentieth century music that
held sway into the mid-1970s, in which Schoenberg played the central role.

Second is the accumulated weight of sustained historical reevaluation.
Those who question how modern Schoenberg really was challenge a facile
equivalence between the terms "modernist" or "avant-garde" and the
twentieth century. Perhaps, they seem to say, modernism in the sense of
Schoenberg and his school refers merely to one limited historical period
and group within the twentieth century. Or there is the line of argument
first put forth decades ago independently by Pierre Boulez and Elliott
Carter questioning how far Schoenberg had really traveled from a dependency
on late nineteenth-century musical models. Were not Webern, Varèse, Ives,
Messiaen, and even Stravinsky equally innovative and significant? This
differentiation within modernism sought to help emancipate post-World War
II composition from too exclusive a bias in favor of Schoenberg. A
divergent view of the century and modernity emerges from these types of
revisionism, one in which Schoenberg holds merely one place of prominence
among many. Schoenberg may have been less a radical conservative and more a
radical reactionary, one who carried Wagner?s belief in a progressive
imperative for music to an absurd extreme into an age in which history
would no longer matter.

By refusing to see Schoenberg as the pivotal figure in the history of
twentieth-century music, these revisionists create a third factor: they
detach Schoenberg?s music and its aesthetic and historical valuation from
the social and political projects to which it was once inextricably linked.
During the 1920s, Hanns Eisler, who retained an unqualified admiration for
Schoenberg, his teacher, was among the first in Schoenberg?s circle to
speculate independently about the function of new music in modernity.
Schoenberg?s modernism consistently offended its audience. If that audience
had been merely made up of smug owners of capital and their bourgeois
apologists, there might have seemed something redeemingly "progressive"
about Schoenberg?s brand of modernism. But the failure of Schoenberg?s
modernism to gain any audience beyond its own elite of admirers? however
constituted?revealed just how hollow were his supporters appeals to
historical necessity or a Platonic belief system that legislated a
normative ideal of musical thought and form and therefore a typo1ogy of
proper listening.

Since Schoenberg?s brand of innovation as well as his Jewish identity
became the focus of anti-Semitic right-wing politics early in the 1920s and
later the object of Nazi persecution in the 1930s, the dissonances between
the progressive in politics and the modernist in music were left
unresolved. The alliance between the two went largely unquestioned for
decades, even well after 1945. In the context of Cold War politics,
Eisler?s challenge to Schoenberg and his school from the left could be
discredited as "Stalinist" and reactionary, while Schoenberg?s brand of
modernism continued, until the late 1960s, to appear as a non-subversive
but forward-looking contemporary line of defense of individuality and
freedom against uniformity and tyranny within the "free world."

Adorno?s analysis of Schoenberg and his influence created a powerful
critical and philosophical framework that buttressed Schoenberg?s post-war
influence, particularly in academic circles. According to this line of
interpretation, modernism in music of the sort audible in Webern and in the
work of the younger composers supported at Darmstadt and Donaueschingen in
the 1950s and 1960s eloquently confronted the corrupting influences
represented in the West by commercialism and mass society, the very ills
that had helped fascism succeed.

With the receding prestige of socialist and progressive politics in the
early 1980s, the growing critique of the liberal welfare state in England
and America and ultimately the collapse of Communism and fall of the Berlin
Wall, the critique of capitalist culture and society put forward by Adorno
and other Frankfurt School contemporaries, particularly Herbert Marcuse,
became less attractive in the West to new generations of young people.
Schoenberg and his notions of musical modernism were gradually detached
from a plausible justifying political and historical logic locating them on
the side of freedom and anti-fascism, and therefore of the angels.

While the later twentieth century heirs of the left have largely rejected
modernism in favor of popular musical culture as an important dimension of
political resistance, neo-conservatives have taken their own peculiar
revenge on Schoenberg. Some have risen to Schoenberg?s defense, citing his
work and legacy as a bulwark against the collapse of cultural standards
after the mid-1960s. Other neo-conservatives, however, have delighted in
the idea that the largely liberal and left-wing post-war academic
community?s "emperor had no clothes" after all.

The fourth factor working against Schoenberg is the reemergence of an
empirical and principled set of arguments prevalent at the turn of the
century that defend tonality (or something very much like it) as natural
and objective. According to this argument, which makes an appeal to
normative philosophy, psychology, and physics, certain ways of organizing
sound and time in music correspond to facts and laws of nature. In the
early twentieth century, Schoenberg found himself on the side of those who
argued against the idea that the Western system of harmony was privileged
and rooted in nature, rendering tonality normative and objective. The
sophisticated revival of the idea of a "natural" music has been fueled
partly by linguistic theory (e.g. Chomsky and generative grammar), language
philosophy (from the late Wittgenstein on) and the analysis of syntax.

Theorists as disparate in their approaches as Boretz and Epstein have
suggested that when we look carefully at music as a reflexive system of
communication we need to explain rather than dismiss the failure of any
music to gain response, engage listeners or be easily preserved in memory.
Perhaps it is not tonality that is natural. But the need for particularly
evident patterns in music: repetition, focal points, continuities,
tensions, resolutions and regularity?the accumulation of classes of events
that can be processed and associated readily by the brain?may be universal.
Schoenberg?s modernism may lack these requirements because of an inherent
conflict between the way we are as humans and the way twelve-tone music is
organized. The wide dissemination (or to put it more plainly, the
popularity) of a form of music need not be considered a sign of vulgarity,
ignorance or concession to corrupt fashion or style. Populist politics and
high theory have now merged: Schoenberg?s brand of modernism, particularly
in its twelve-tone phase, becomes a failed experiment that can- not
intersect effectively with wider human experience cognitively and therefore
either aesthetically or politically.

The fifth and final barrier to a sympathetic rehearing of Schoenberg today
is ironically the difficulty we have in transcending the accumulated
traditional rhetoric of criticism and defense surrounding the question of
Schoenberg. Schoenberg and his disciples in the 1920s can be compared
properly to the circle around the poet Stefan George, to whose work
Schoenberg turned at a pivotal moment when the composer took a decisive
step away from tonality. But the most apt comparison is with Richard
Wagner. Not only did they both have disciples and demand uncommon degrees
of loyalty from their followers, but Wagner and Schoenberg invented and
institutionalized a rhetoric of self-defense and description. They both
brilliantly placed themselves within music history and connected their work
to past and future. Institutions designed to preserve and defend the
Schoenberg legacy were created, first in Los Angeles, then in Vienna.
Schools of composition and criticism that developed after 1945 relied
heavily on Schoenberg?s analysis of compositional methods, his views on
form and structure, and his readings of Mozart and Brahms. To generations
of Schoenberg admirers, followers and scholars, any departure from this
self-constituted (or auto-poetic) code of discourse of defense and
description was tantamount to ignorance or betrayal.

Schoenberg?s philosophy of music and his logic of self-estimation have cast
a decisive shadow over music theory and musicology in this century. Whether
it is the concept of "idea" (as opposed to "style"), the "Grundgestalt,"
"developing variation," the "emancipation of the dissonance" or the
relation of music and text, the way Schoenberg thought and wrote about
music and its meaning has had perhaps more influence in the arenas of
performance practice and critical approaches to music in this century than
his own music has had on the writing of new music. At the end of this
century, almost fifty years after Schoenberg?s death, it is in part the
institutionalized charisma of Schoenberg the teacher and theorist that
retards a new appreciation of his music. Perhaps if we successfully
challenge the rhetoric of Schoenberg and his most ardent posthumous
defenders, we will be able to open up new avenues of access to his music.



Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)